Cher's Life Advice on Love, Money, and Leaving

On a hotel balcony, somewhere on a tour stop she can no longer place, Cher had one thought and then, right behind it, a second one that changed everything. She had stopped eating. She had stopped sleeping. She was thinking about jumping. And then a different idea arrived, almost by accident: she did not have to jump. She could leave him.

That moment, which Cher recounts in her new memoir and describes again on We Can Do Hard Things, is the hinge of this conversation. Cher was 16 when she entered the relationship that would become Sonny and Cher (07:32). She calls it plainly: "I didn't have much self to lose" (07:32). What follows is not a story about fame corrupting a person. It is a story about a marriage with two entirely different addresses: one on stage, where she and Sonny Bono were equals and, by her account, having genuine fun, and one off stage, where she was not allowed to talk to the band, go anywhere, or make a single decision for herself (11:20).

"And then I thought, 'I could leave him.'" (Cher, [12:02])

That split, between a performing self with room to breathe and a private self with none, is the part of the book Cher says was hardest to write. Memoir, she tells the hosts, means "telling things you don't really wanna tell" in your own voice, not the encyclopedia version a ghostwriter once handed her (04:36). She rewrote it three times. The difficulty was not craft. It was honesty.

The advice that eventually got her out came from another woman who had been there first. Cher asked Lucille Ball, the comedian and television producer she had known since childhood, what to do. Ball's answer was immediate: "Fuck him. You're the one with the talent" (15:56). Cher later passed a version of that same permission to Tina Turner, who came to her for advice on how to leave Ike Turner. When Turner asked how she'd done it, Cher's answer was almost anticlimactic: "I just walked out one night" (16:20). She left with a car, her clothes, and a $2 million debt (16:47).

The Ledger of a Marriage

The debt was not incidental. It was the point. Cher tells the hosts that trusting Sonny Bono with money was the mistake that cost her the most. She never wrote a check of her own until right before she left him (14:11). When she finally asked him directly, years later, when exactly he'd decided it was fine to take her money, his answer was not really an answer: "I always knew you'd leave me" (29:02). She calls it what it was: "It's abusive" (29:31).

The clearest number in the whole conversation is also the starkest. The company built around her name, Cher Enterprises, was owned 95 percent by Sonny Bono, 5 percent by their lawyer, and 0 percent by Cher (29:58). She could only legally work for that company. When she finally broke the contract through divorce, a judge ordered her to pay Sonny $2 million anyway, telling her, in her retelling, that "in America, we don't welsh on contracts" (30:56). Her private response, which she shares now without much editing, was to wonder aloud what the country does about husbands who steal from their wives. Glennon's response, delivered with dry sarcasm: in America, apparently, that is allowed too (31:07).

Out of that experience comes the one piece of financial advice Cher offers women listening now. Not a formula. A posture. Keep your head down, she says, and find out what people are doing with your money, because it scares people to learn about money when they are poor, and because "some people are not always good" (28:13). It is advice earned the hard way, at a cost that took her years and a lost court case to fully understand.

She rebuilt anyway. When her career later gave her the thing she'd always wanted, financial independence, she delivered the line to her mother that has since ended up on needlepoint pillows. Her mother suggested she marry a rich man. Cher's reply: "Mom, I am a rich man" (27:24).

A Bumper Car, Not a Straight Line

Money and marriage are not the only place Cher's honesty runs deep in this conversation. Asked about her son Chaz Bono's coming out and later transition, she does not reach for a tidy redemption story. "I was terrible," she says, twice (32:11). She was not unloving. She was frightened for what Chaz would face in a world that can be cruel to trans people, and she admits she was not, at first, the parent she wanted to be (33:48). What she offers instead of a clean lesson is a more useful one: that getting it wrong early does not disqualify a parent from getting it right later. "I wasn't the person that I should have been. I wasn't the person that I wanted to be," she says of that period, before describing the strong relationship she and Chaz share now (34:07).

The same instinct, to keep moving rather than to stay stuck, shows up in the metaphor Cher returns to when asked how she survived decades of public criticism, from tabloid mockery of her Las Vegas years to reaction over her Met Gala dress. "I'm like a bumper car, and if I hit a wall, I'm gonna back up and I'm gonna go in another direction, and that's all that was left for me," she says (40:01). It is not a philosophy she claims to have chosen. It is the only strategy she says she knew.

That same lack of another option, more than any master plan, is how she describes her accidental path into acting. After a divorce and a financial collapse, she went to New York, mostly because she didn't know what else to do, and stumbled into an audition with director Robert Altman that happened only because her mother misdialed a phone number (42:13). She told Altman she is dyslexic, a learning difference that affects reading, and that she could read a script or act it but not both at once (43:29). He cast her anyway. She went on to work with Meryl Streep and to build a film career she describes, still, as something of a fluke (40:26).

By the end of the conversation, Cher draws a distinction between her two art forms that doubles as a description of her own temperament. Singing, she says, is external: standing on stage and letting a voice come out, big or soft, whatever the moment needs. Acting is internal, a matter of getting small before anything is allowed to come out at all (45:59). It is a fitting way to end a conversation that spent an hour moving between the two: a woman who performed enormity for fifty years while quietly working out, often alone, how to become someone smaller could survive.

Asked, finally, to name the source of her endurance, Cher declines the word courage. "I never thought of it as courage. It was just not giving up," she says (47:44). It is a small redefinition, but it changes the shape of the advice. Courage, in her telling, is not a rare trait some people have and others lack. It is only the plain, repeatable act of moving forward while still scared.